I appreciate your time and effort

Zen and Control
This is it
Allan Watts

So long as you let it think what it wants at each successive moment, there is absolutely no effort, no difficulty, in letting it go. But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the seperate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering. Now there is nothing to try to do, for whatever comes up moment by moment is accepted, including not-accepting. For a second the thinker seems to be responding to the flow of thought with the immediacy of a mirror-image, and then suddenly it dawns that there is no mirror and no image. There is simply the flow of thought--one after another without interference--and the mind really knows itself. There is no separate mind which stands aside and looks at it.

Furthermore, when the dualism of thinker and thought disappears so does that of subject and object. The individual no more feels himself to be standing back from his sensations of the external world, just as he is no longer a thinker standing back from the thoughts. He therefore has a vivid sense of himself as identical with what he sees and hears, so that his subjective impression comes into accord with the physical fact that man is not so much an organism in an environment as an organism-environment relationship. The relationship is, as it were, more real than its two terms, somewhat as the inner unity of a stick is more solid than the difference of its two ends.

The human being who has realized this unity is no longer a trap set to catch itself. For self-consciousness is no more a state of being in two minds, which, fortuitously enough, also means a state of indecision and dither and psychic paralysis. This is what self-consciousness becomes when we try to handle it dualistically, taking as real the conventions of thought and speech which separate "I" from "myself," as well as mind from body, spirit from matter, knower from the known. In separation, the self I know is never the one I need to know, and the one I control is never the one I need to control."
________

So I was looking for the moment.  The crux.  The sentence that was the springboard for the ideas that blossomed into conclusions Watts later reached.

Opps!  I typed this part twice:

" ... just as he is no longer a thinker standing back from the thoughts. "

I hit the paste button thinking this thing I'd been reading a few days ago would pop up.  These words appear:  I appreciate your time and effort."

Whoa.  So even this pool I'm gazing into has a voice?

A couple of days ago my neighbor was taping a workshop she led for an online class she was taking.  It was about dealing with changing roles as caretakers of aging parents--both of my divorced parents were hospitalized or looking at hospitalization last week ... at the same time in different cities.  From talking with other participants I realized I have a problem solving style I didn't recognize before.  Seeing how other people use a similar style helped me see its good points and I think I"ll be better suited to use my strengths in the future.

It makes me realize how I cut myself into tiny pieces always struggling to control my reactions in an attempt to create a particular effect .  As Watt concludes:

"... For what is important is not the particular things to be done but the attitude--the inner feeling and disposition--of the doer.  What is needed is not a new kind of technique but  new kind of man, for as an old Taoist text say, "When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way."  And the task of developing a new kind of man is not as difficult as it seems once we are disabused of the idea that self-change and self control are no more a matter of conflict between higher and lower natures, of good intentions against recalcitrant instincts.  The problem is to overcome the ingrained disbelief in the power of winning nature by love, in the gentle (fu) way (do) of turning with the skid, of controlling ourselves by cooperating with ourselves."